Technical Support

Archibus Technical Support will answer customization questions only for those who have a support contract and who have attended Archibus Advanced Training.

To submit a support request on a database customization issue, you must submit a small SQL script file that shows how to change the standard schema so that it illustrates the problem.

Redistribution, Licensing, and Copyright

We are delighted that many applications specialists have written their own Archibus domains, and are distributing them through their own contacts and are setting their own prices for them. We have no claim on the work that a customizer produces.

However, you do need a copy of the Archibus program to run any domain. Note that any machine that executes the Archibus application control program (afmxx.exe) must have a license for the application control program. Any machine that executes the Archibus Overlay (afmxx.arx) must have a license for the Overlay.

Also be aware of the domain licensing. The Archibus domains are written using the program's own extensions, and the code and database schema are open for inspection. They are, however, copyrighted. Like a book, you cannot copy the schema or code without licensing that copy.

If you start your own domain from the ground up, including only the Archibus definition tables that start with "afm_", you are not using any copyrighted material.

If you use common fields (e.g. the Building Code, Floor Code, and Room Number fields of the Rooms table), likewise, you are not using copyrighted material, as these fields represent common ways of modeling your facility.

If you use Archibus fields, such as the Room Category and Room Type fields or most of the fields of the Work Requests table, then you must license the domain to which these fields belong.

New Archibus Versions

We make every effort to make newer versions upward compatible. It's safe to say that no one has as large a body of code as our own customizations.

Yet the industry is moving at an astonishing speed, and the newer technologies may not have direct corollaries to existing features. For instance, solutions that use DCOM to access transaction managers on a server will have a different order of calls to the function API than a customization that talks to a local client network requestor.

In general, while revision-level updates to Archibus are likely to have a superset of the current API, be prepared for some code changes with version-level updates of Archibus.